Anchored in Thuringia
Ich musz ein Geschöpf um mich haben, das mir gehört.
_Letter of 1788_.
The Weimar of Schiller's first acquaintance--arrived there July 21,
1787--consisted of a petty provincial court plus an unsightly village.
The inhabitants numbered about six thousand. Of the space built over
about one-third was occupied by the buildings of the court, much of the
outlying modern Weimar being then under water. The streets were narrow,
muddy lanes, the houses plain and poor. And yet the sluggish little
place, so unprepossessing in all material ways, was already beginning to
assert that claim to glory which has since been conceded to it by all
the world. Princely patronage of art and letters was by no means unknown
elsewhere in Germany, but it was usually a matter of gracious
condescension on the one side and grateful adulation on the other. Very
different in Weimar, where Goethe was not only a member of the Council,
but the duke's most intimate friend and trusted adviser. In his heart
Karl August cared less for aesthetic matters than is often supposed, but
his mother, the Dowager Duchess Amalie, patronized art for the real love
of it. Poetry and music were as the breath of life to her, and her taste
in poetry had been trained by the greatest living master. Aside from
Goethe, two other distinguished writers had found a home in Weimar. The
kindly but changeable Wieland, not really one of the _dii majores_,
but so regarded at the time, had lived there since 1772; Herder, much
more nobly endowed, but less amiable and less popular, since 1776.
At the time of Schiller's advent Goethe was still in Italy, whither he
had gone the previous autumn to find relief from the miseries of
duodecimo statesmanship. Karl August and the reigning Duchess Luise were
also absent, but several minor notables of the court circle had remained
'in town', and the dowager duchess was giving aesthetic teas as usual
in her easily accessible 'castle' at Tiefurt. Wieland and Herder were
likewise at home. On his arrival Schiller was taken charge of by the
Baroness von Kalb, who was awaiting her soul's affinity with feverish
eagerness. Her excitement at seeing him again amounted to a 'paroxysm'
which made her ill for a week. Then she grew better and her emotions
gradually found the level of a friendliness too passionate to be called
Platonic, but not sinful in the lower sense. As for Schiller, he
devotedly let himself be loved and introduced to Weimar society, the
pair making no concealment of their liking for each other. At first he
felt some compunctions on account of the absent husband, who might be
annoyed by gossip. It pleased him to observe, therefore, that in Weimar
such a friendship was taken as a matter of course and treated with
delicacy.[73] 'Charlotte' he wrote to Körner, 'is a grand, exceptional,
womanly soul, a real study for me and worthy to occupy a greater mind
than mine. With each forward step in our intercourse I discover in her
new manifestations that surprise and delight me like beautiful spots in
a broad landscape.'
For several months he played this unwholesome role of cicisbeo to
Charlotte von Kalb. Then another and very different Charlotte crossed
his path and quickly taught him the better way.
The story of Schiller's gradual adjustment to the Weimar _milieu_ is
told very fully in his frequent letters to Körner. He called upon Herder
and Wieland, and was received with 'amazing politeness' by the one, with
loquacious cordiality by the other. Herder knew nothing of his writings
and regaled him with idolatrous talk about Goethe. Wieland knew all
about him except that he had not yet seen 'Don Carlos'; criticised his
early plays frankly as lacking in correctness and artistic finish, but
expressed the utmost confidence in him nevertheless. He was received at
Tiefurt, but did not like the dowager duchess: her mind, he reported,
was very narrow; nothing interested her but the sensuous. A few days
later he heard that 'Don Carlos' had been read to a select assembly at
Tiefurt and had not made a good impression; there had been caustic
criticism of the piece, particularly the last two acts, and Wieland, who
was present, had not stood up for it. This led to a coolness toward
Wieland. By the end of three weeks Schiller had despaired of Weimar and
was miserable. He thought of leaving the place in disgust.
In August he spent a week at Jena as the guest of Professor Reinhold,
who was about to begin lecturing upon Kant and was predicting that after
a century the Königsberg philosopher would have a reputation like that
of Jesus Christ. Reinhold's enthusiasm led Schiller to read some of
Kant's shorter essays, among which a paper upon universal history gave
him 'extraordinary satisfaction'. From Reinhold came also the assurance
that it would be easy to secure a Jena professorship. The idea did not
at once take hold of him in the sense of becoming a definite purpose,
but it tallied with his inclination. His experience with 'Don Carlos'
had left him in doubt whether the drama was after all his true vocation,
and he had already begun to work fitfully upon a history of the Dutch
Rebellion.
So he decided to remain a little longer in Weimar and devote himself to
historical writing; and, this resolution formed, life at once began to
open more pleasantly before him. He saw that he had made the mistake of
taking the Weimar magnates too seriously; of imagining that they were
all sitting in judgment upon him, and that it was of the greatest
importance to win their favor. 'I begin to find life here quite
tolerable,' he wrote early in September, 'and the secret of it--you will
wonder that it did not occur to me before--is not to bother my head
about anybody.' And indeed he had no reason to be disgruntled. Herder
was pleased with 'Don Carlos' and came out in its favor before the
aesthetic tribunal of Tiefurt. Wieland noticed it favorably in the
_Merkur_, spoke flatteringly of it in conversation and declared himself
now convinced that Schiller's forte was the drama. Henceforth the two
men were fast friends and presently Schiller was toying with the thought
of marrying Wieland's favorite daughter. 'I do not know the girl at
all', he wrote, 'but I would ask for her to-day if I thought I deserved
her.'[74] His scruple was that he was too much of a cosmopolitan to be
permanently contented with 'these people'. A simple-minded, innocent
girl of domestic proclivities would not be happy with him.
The autumn passed in quiet work devoted mainly to his 'Defection of the
Netherlands'. The Duke of Weimar came home for a few days towards the
ist of October, but immediately went away again to Holland. Schiller did
not even see him. Evidently there was nothing to be hoped for
immediately in that quarter; he would have to rely upon himself. But he
was now in demand. The _Merkur_ was eager for contributions from his
pen, and so was the _Litteratur-Zeitung_, whose extensive review factory
had been shown him during his sojourn in Jena. Then there was the
comatose _Thalia_, which he determined to revive after New Year's.
In November he spent a few days at Meiningen, where his sister
Christophine was now living as the wife of Reinwald. He saw Frau von
Wolzogen and Lotte (who was about to be married), but Bauerbach had lost
its charm. 'The old magic,' he wrote to Korner, 'had been blown away. I
felt nothing. None of all the places that formerly made my solitude
interesting had anything to say to me.' On his return fate was lurking
for him at Rudolstadt, where his friend, Wilhelm von Wolzogen,
introduced him to Frau von Lengefeld and her two daughters, 'Both
creatures ', Schiller wrote, 'are attractive, without being beautiful
and please me much. You find here considerable acquaintance with recent
literature, also refinement, feeling and intelligence. They play the
piano well, which gave me a delightful evening.' The elder daughter,
Karoline, was married unhappily to a Herr von Beulwitz, from whom she
afterwards separated to marry Wilhelm von Wolzogen. She was a woman of
much literary talent, which found employment later in a novel, 'Agnes
von Lilien', and in her excellent memoir of Schiller. The other daughter
was unmarried and bore the auspicious name of Charlotte.
Lotte von Lengefeld, whose memory Is cherished with idealizing
tenderness by the Germans, was now twenty-one years old,--a demure
maiden whose eyes spake more than her tongue. She had long since won the
heart of the Baroness von Stein, who had introduced her at the Weimar
court and held out to her the hope of becoming a lady-in-waiting to the
Duchess Luise. Goethe was fond of her and did not omit to send her
affectionate greetings from distant Italy. Some time before, she had
spent a year with her mother and sister in Switzerland for the purpose
of improving her French; and on the way home, in the summer of 1784, the
party had caught a glimpse of Schiller in Mannheim. Now the sisters were
living in a sort of idyllic solitude at Rudolstadt, cut off from the
great world, absorbed in their books, their music, and the memories of
that happy year in Switzerland. Karoline von Wolzogen writes, in
speaking of this occasion:
My sister was seemingly in every respect a desirable match for
Schiller. She had a very winsome form and face. An expression of
purest goodness of heart enlivened her features, and her eyes
flashed only truth and innocence. Thoughtful and susceptible to the
good and the beautiful in life and in art, her whole nature was a
beautiful harmony. Of even temper, but faithful and tenacious in her
affections, she seemed created to enjoy the purest happiness.
Making all needful allowance for the partiality of a sister, one cannot
wonder that the visitor went on his way with the feeling that Rudolstadt
might be a good place in which to spend the summer.
The condition of his mind was certainly such as to facilitate the
designs of Providence. In January, 1788, he wrote to Korner as follows:
I am leading a miserable life, miserable through the condition of my
inner being. I must have a creature about me who belongs to me; whom
I can and must make happy; in whose existence my own can grow fresh
again. You do not know how desolate my soul is, how dark my mind;
and all not because of my external fortune,--for I am really very
well off so far as that is concerned,--but because of the inward
wearing out of my feelings.... I need a medium through which I can
enjoy the other blessings. Friendship, taste, truth and beauty will
produce a greater effect upon me when a continual succession of
sweet, beneficent, domestic feelings attune me to joy and warm up my
torpid being.
In mid-winter Lotte von Lengefeld came to Weimar for the social season
and Schiller saw her occasionally with steadily increasing interest.
Their famous correspondence, beginning in February, 1788, is at first
very reserved, very formal and decorous, but soon begins to bewray the
beating of the heart. 'You will go, dearest Fräulein', writes Schiller
on the 5th of April, as Lotte was about to return to Rudolstadt, 'and I
feel that you take away with you the best part of my present joys.' A
month later she had found him lodgings in the neighboring village of
Volkstedt, and then came a delightful summer idyl, which prolonged
itself until the middle of November,--an idyl not of love-making, for
Schiller could not yet pluck up the courage for that, but of spiritual
comradeship. To quote Karoline again:
A new life began for Schiller in our house. He had long been denied
the delight of a free, friendly intercourse, and he always found us
susceptible to the thoughts that filled his soul. He wished to
influence us, to teach us what might serve our turn of poetry, art,
and philosophy, and this effort gave to himself a gentle harmonious
disposition.... When we saw him coming to our house in the shimmer
of the sunset, a bright ideal life disclosed itself to our inner
sense. Lofty seriousness and the light gracious winsomeness of a
pure and open soul were always present in Schiller's conversation;
in listening to him one walked as among the changeless stars of
heaven and the flowers of the earth.... Schiller became calmer,
clearer; his appearance and his character more winsome, his mind
more averse to those fantastic views of life which he had hitherto
not been able to banish. A new hope and joy dawned in the heart of
my sister, and I returned, in the happiness of a new inspiring
friendship, to a true enjoyment of life. Our whole social circle
shared in the pleasure of this kindly magic.
The discourse of these amiable truth-seekers turned partly at least upon
the Greeks. Up to this time Schiller had remained virtually ignorant of
the Greek poets, thus missing the best of all sanative influences. He
had absorbed indirectly something of the Hellenism that had been
diffused through the air by Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder and Goethe, but
his knowledge of the Greek language was very rudimentary, and good
translations had not been easily procurable. Thus the glory that was
Greece now came to him with the charm of a new discovery. The poem, 'The
Gods of Greece,' contributed to the _Merkur_ in March, 1788, marks the
beginning of his Hellenizing. A little later Homer fascinated him. A
letter written in August runs thus:
I now read almost nothing but Homer. I have got Voss' translation of
the Odyssey, which is in truth excellent, aside from the hexameters,
which I cannot endure.... For the next two years I have made up my
mind to read no more modern authors.... Not one of them benefits me.
They all lead me away from myself, and the ancients now give me true
enjoyment. At the same time I need them most urgently to purify my
own taste, which through subtlety, artificiality and smartness was
beginning to depart from true simplicity. You will find that
familiar intercourse with the ancients will benefit me exceedingly,
perhaps give me classicity. I shall first study them in good
translations and then, when I almost know them by heart, read the
Greek originals. In this way I expect to play at the study of the
Greek language.
On the 7th of September, 1788, an event occurred: Goethe, who had now
returned from Italy, came to visit the Lengefelds, and Schiller was
introduced to him. For a year he had heard Goethe idolized on every hand
and felt his spirit brooding over the Weimar atmosphere. What he heard
did not please him. The local Goethe-cult, so he wrote to Körner, was
characterized by a proud, philosophic contempt of all speculation and
investigation. This 'child-like simplicity of mind', this 'resigned
surrender to the five senses', seemed to him a sort of affectation.
Besides this he was irritated by Goethe's prosperity and lordly
independence. At the same time he could not help admiring him as a poet.
The new 'Iphigenie' gave him a 'happy day', though his pleasure was
somewhat marred by the depressing thought that he himself would never be
able to produce anything like it. And so he waited with eager
expectation to see what a personal acquaintance would bring forth. It
brought forth pleasure mixed with dubiety. After that first interview
with the great man he wrote to Korner thus:
On the whole, my idea of him, which was in truth very great, has
not suffered from this personal acquaintance; but I doubt whether
we shall ever come very close to each other. Much that is still
interesting to me has had its day with him. He is so far in advance
of me,--not so much in years but in self-development and experience
of life,--that we shall never come together. And then his whole
being is differently organized from mine. His world is not mine;
our ways of looking at things seem essentially different.
Nevertheless one cannot draw a sure conclusion from such a meeting.
Time will tell.
Upon Goethe the meeting made no impression at all. For him Schiller was
the author of 'The Robbers', a work whose popularity annoyed him. He did
not know, and he took no pains to find out, that Schiller was no longer
in sympathy with the ideas that had found expression in the detested
play. So he held himself aloof and six years passed ere the two men came
together in a friendly intimacy. At the same time there was nothing like
ill-will on Goethe's part. He recognized Schiller's talent, praised 'The
Gods of Greece' and was half pleased with the review of 'Egmont', which
might well have nettled a less Olympian temper. In the fall of 1788 'The
Defection of the Netherlands' was published and favorably received.
About the same time a vacancy occurred in the Jena faculty, and
Schiller's friends proposed him for the position. Goethe took the matter
up with the various governments concerned and met with no opposition.
And so it came about, one day in December, that Schiller, who had
meanwhile taken to translating Euripides and was planning a whole Greek
theater in German, was interrupted by an official notice that he had
been appointed professor of history at Jena and would be expected to
enter upon his duties in the spring. It was only an 'extraordinary'
professorship without salary, but its possibilities as a stepping-stone
were alluring. He decided to accept.
Now came a short season of helpless and comical dismay. 'I would take a
thrashing', he wrote to Körner, 'if I could have you here for
four-and-twenty hours. Goethe quotes his _docendo discitur_, but these
gentlemen do not seem to know how small my learning is.' To Lotte he
declared that he should feel ridiculous in the new situation. 'Many a
student will perhaps know more history than the professor. Nevertheless
I think like Sancho Panza with respect to his governorship: To whom God
gives an office, to him he gives understanding; and when I have my
island I shall rule it like a nabob.' It was not pleasant to drop his
fascinating studies of the Greek poets and bury himself in learned
sawdust, but the thing was not to be helped. So the winter and spring
were devoted mainly to historical reading. At the same time, however,
'The Ghostseer' was carried along in the now resuscitated _Thalia_, and
the long poem, 'The Artists', was slowly and with infinite revision got
ready for publication in the _Merkur_.
During this period he saw little or nothing of Goethe and steadily
nursed a splenetic determination not to like the man. Passages
in his letters are almost comical in their perversity of
misjudgment. He was exasperated by Goethe's reticence, composure and
self-sufficiency,--qualities which seemed to him to spring out of
calculating egotism. Goethe, so the arraignment ran, was a man who went
on his way serenely dispensing favors, winning love and admiration and
putting people under obligation, but always like a god,--without ever
giving his intimate self or surrendering his own freedom. For his part,
he, Schiller, did not wish to live near such a man, much as he admired
his intellect and valued his judgment. This attitude of his was a great
trial to the Lengefeld sisters, who did not fail to expostulate with
him. But it was of no use. 'I have not time', he declared, 'in this
short and busy life, to attempt a decipherment of Goethe's enigmatic
character. If he is really such a very lovable being, I shall find it
out in the next world, when we shall all be angels.' In fine he was not
yet ripe for an understanding of the Weimar sovereign. He did not see
that Goethe's method was after all a giving of himself, and that the
self thus given was not the worse but the better for having outgrown the
effusive raptures of sentimentalism.
In May the lectures at Jena began with great _éclat_. On the first day
students to the number of five or six hundred flocked to hear the author
of 'The Robbers' expound the difference between the philosophic scholar
and the bread-and-butter professor. It was an inspiring discourse, full
of high idealism and well fitted to inspire the souls of ingenuous
youth, even though they might not quite understand it. The students were
enthusiastic and gave the new professor the unusual compliment of a
serenade. Having decided to begin with a course of free public lectures
upon universal history, he took his duties very seriously, and even
after curiosity had abated he continued, during the first term, to
address a large audience. He had hoped only for prestige, and the game
was quickly won. He was the most popular professor in Jena. All this
time, however, his heart was in Rudolstadt,--with the two sisters to
whom, for a year and a half, he had been writing letters of impartial
Platonic devotion. Late in July he received a hint from Karoline to the
effect that her sister was very much in love with him and that an
understanding might be desirable. Then at last the timorous, cunctatory
worshiper of femininity in the abstract declared himself and prayed to
know if the good news could be true. Lotte assured him that it was; if
she could make him happy she was willing to devote herself to the
enterprise during the remainder of her days.
Now the millennium began. Our celestial dreamer, who had thus been
gently pushed over the threshold by a friendly hand, found himself in a
human paradise much more grateful to the soul than the court of Venus
Urania. He was very, very happy. The black phantoms that had beset his
pathway hitherto,--the depressing sense of loneliness, of having missed
the great prize, of being _de trop_ at the banquet of life, the
occasional promptings of pessimism and misanthropy, the baleful pull of
illicit passion, the selfish hugging of an illusory freedom,--all these
took their flight to return no more. He had found what he
needed--salvation from self through a woman's love. But he did not
behave like other sons of Adam. He continued to address his love-letters
to both sisters impartially, as if the possession of Lotte were after
all to be only a subordinate incident in the preservation of a
triangular spiritual friendship. Sometimes it is 'my dearest, dearest
Karoline', again 'my dearest, dearest Lotte', most frequently 'my
dearest dears'.
At first the trio agreed to keep their momentous secret from _chère
mère_. Schiller was poor and his prospects all uncertain. When he began,
in the fall of 1789, to give lectures that were to be paid for, he found
that his income from students' fees would be insignificant. Lotte had
but a slender portion, and then there was that dreadful _von_ in her
name. To meet this difficulty Schiller procured the title of 'Hofrat'
from the Duke of Meiningen. Then he laid the case before Karl August of
Weimar, who was very sympathetic but also very poor. The best he could
do was to promise shamefacedly a pittance of two hundred thalers by way
of professorial salary. This, with love, was enough. In one of the
noblest letters he ever wrote Schiller now addressed himself to _chère
mère_ who made no objections; and on the 22nd of February, 1790, the
impecunious Hofrat Professor Schiller and his courageous, aristocratic
sweetheart were married.
The work of Schiller in the historical field will be considered by
itself in the next chapter. Before passing on to that subject, however,
let us glance at the more important of the minor writings produced
during the period just traversed.
In 'The Gods of Greece' he strikes with almost clangorous emphasis the
note of pagan aestheticism. The poem sees the world under the aspect of
the Beautiful and regards that as its most important aspect. The Greek
religion, we hear, peopled earth and sky and sea with lovely forms that
gave warmth and color to life and fed the imagination with sensuous
poetry. Nature appeared living, spiritual. Rock and stream and tree had
each its tale to tell, its tale of passionate personal history. The gods
were near, intelligible, sympathetic; and divine gifts were more
precious for being shared by the giver. And as the gods were more human,
so man was more divine. In comparison our modern monotheism is cold,
abstract, mechanical. Instead of a radiant Apollo, we have the law of
gravitation. We have lost the many fair gods of old to enrich One who is
remote, unfathomable, self-sufficient.
Where art thou, beauteous world of story?
Fair morning of a vanished day!
Alas! the magic of thine ancient glory
Lives only in the poet's lay.[75]
It was inevitable that such a frank eulogy of the old gods at the
expense of the Christian Demiurgus should give offense. Count Leopold
von Stolberg put himself at the head of a vociferous opposition by
denouncing the poem in a Leipzig journal as blasphemous, and lamenting
that the author of the noble 'Song to Joy' should have fallen so low.
The modern reader finds it easy to acquit him on the religious
arraignment, since he did not profess to present the claims of
monotheism completely. We are quite willing to judge of poetry as poetry
and to leave it its ancient privilege of passionate overstatement. Of
this privilege Schiller availed himself in the fullest measure, going
quite beyond the bounds of sanity in his idealization of the Greeks,
Well might the indignant Stolberg ask him if he really believed that the
'eternal bonds of the heart were gentler and holier when Hymen tied
them'. Whatever else may be said of them, the amours of the Greeks (gods
and men) were not remarkably strong on the side of gentleness, holiness
and fidelity.
In respect of poetic merit Schiller certainly had the right to his
opinion that 'The Gods of Greece' surpassed his earlier efforts. To
please Wieland he aimed at Horatian correctness, and he came near
hitting the mark. There is no progress toward lightness of touch or
melody of phrasing,--Schiller was not the man for tuneful titillation of
the ear,--but the poem is tolerably free from the bizarre hyperboles
that mar its predecessors. It is intellectual, argumentative, but
suffused at the same time with genuine feeling, and the stanzas have a
stately impressive swing. Goethe was pleased with the poem, but thought
it too long,--a well-founded criticism, since many of the stanzas merely
brought fresh illustrations of the same thought. In his revision
Schiller reduced the twenty-five stanzas of the original version to
sixteen, and at the same time omitted or toned down the lines that had
given offense. In its revised form it is in every way a better poem.
In 'The Artists' we have a sonorous panegyric of Art as the great
teacher and refiner of mankind. The poem shows the influence of Herder's
evolutionary speculations, being in reality nothing less than a
condensed history of civilization. The old Rousseauite point of view is
here completely abandoned. No more girding at the degeneracy of the
'ink-spattering century'! The opening lines glorify the modern man as
the 'ripest son of time, free through reason, strong through laws, great
through gentleness'. Then the sublime creature is admonished not to
forget the goddess who made him what he is:
In industry the bee may scorn thy merits,
In cleverness a worm thy teacher be;
Thy knowledge thou must share with happier spirits,
But Art, O Man, is all for thee.[76]
After this we hear that man entered the land of knowledge through the
morning gate of the beautiful; it was his inchoate art-sense that
developed his understanding. The heavenly goddess Urania, whom we know
here as Beauty and shall one day known as Truth, accompanied him into
the exile of mortality and became his loving nurse, teaching him to live
by her law, free from wild passion and from the bondage of duty. To aid
her in this work she chose a select body of priests, the artists, and
taught them to imitate the fair forms of nature. In the contemplation of
their work savage man was lifted to the heights of spiritual joy and
forgot his gross appetites. He became acquainted with ideals and made
gods and heroes for himself. Then he began to weigh and compare these
ideals and thus arose philosophy and science, which aim in their slow
and halting way to explain the full import of the primeval revelation.
All truth was given in symbols at the beginning, and the artists still
remain the conservators and prophets of the highest spiritual things.
In case of such a metrical disquisition it is not easy to separate the
poetry, which in places is very good, from the intellectual content,
which is not so good from a modern point of view. By the joint aid of
several sciences laboriously piecing together bits of knowledge that
have nothing to do with the goddess Urania, we have learned something of
primitive man, and what we have learned is very much out of tune with
Schiller's dream. He assigns to the aesthetic thrill a larger rôle than
it has actually played in human history. This, however, is unimportant.
What is more important is that by investing his subject with a nimbus of
poetic mysticism he became one of the founders of the modern Religion of
Art. For the theological revelation of truth he substitutes a secular
revelation of beauty, which, however, was regarded by him as containing
the germs of all truth and virtue. We see him moving toward a theory
that Truth, Beauty and Goodness are one, and that Beauty is the one.
To-day these abstractions, even when written with a capital initial,
have no power to turn the heads of any but a few of the
hyperaesthetical. For Schiller's contemporaries, aweary of rationalistic
narrowness and reaching out after new sources of inspiration, the
Religion of Art had the great advantage of novelty. It laid hold of them
powerfully, remaining, however, a dignified intellectual cult which was
quite compatible with plain surroundings. It was a very different thing
from the later decorative aestheticism.
As poetry 'The Artists' may be said to come under the head of metrical
rhetoric. It quite lacks the simplicity and sensuousness of Milton's
canon, and as for passion, it is florid rather than passionate. It is
however strong in Schiller's strength,--in its vastness of outlook, its
splendid sweep of thought, its magnificent phrase-making. At first
indeed the reader is disturbed and perplexed by the argument. He is
lifted up into the blue mists, far above the plane of the verifiable,
and borne along hither and thither by successive gusts of the poetic
afflatus. Presently he is lost; there is no north and no south. By dint
of review and cogitation he gets his bearings (if he is lucky), but only
to lose them again as he is wafted on through the empyrean. Not until he
has read the poem many times, knows where he is going and is no longer
pestered by the necessity of thinking, can he hope to enjoy the voyage.
The beginning of 'The Ghostseer,' published while Schiller was still in
Dresden, was spoken of in Chapter VIII. His general idea, it would seem,
was to describe an elaborate and fine-spun intrigue devised by
mysterious agents of the Romish Church for the purpose of winning over a
Protestant German prince. But the details had not been very fully
excogitated, and his foremost thought, after all, was simply to
popularize the _Thalia_, which was largely caviare to the general. The
experiment proved moderately successful. Curiosity was excited and
inquiries began to be made. When, therefore, he was ready to resume the
publication of the _Thalia_, in the spring of 1788, he had reason to
regard 'The Ghostseer' as his most valuable asset. He set about
continuing the story, feeling that it was 'miserable daubing' and a
'sinful waste of time'.[77] In this temper he wrote and published a
second installment, which carried the story through what was
subsequently known as the first book. In this installment the hoax of
the ghost scene is cleared up, but the Armenian remains a mystery. The
Prince maintains a sensible, rationalistic attitude, asks many
questions, puts this and that together and finally concludes that
Armenian and Sicilian are two charlatans working In collusion.
Up to this point 'The Ghostseer' is a well-told and readable yarn, with
only just philosophizing enough to give it a touch of dignity. In the
second book it runs off into a quagmire of abstruse speculation,
Schiller had got the idea--and it interested him for personal
reasons--of carrying his hero through a debauch of skepticism. This he
thought would give weight and distinction to the book. So the Prince's
philosophic demoralization is described at tedious length and the story
drops out of sight for a long time. Then it is taken up again and the
Prince falls in love with a beautiful Greek _réligieuse_. The portrayal
of this woman aroused another flicker of interest on Schiller's part,
though she too was finally to be unmasked as one of the conspirators.
Then he seems to have tired of 'The Ghostseer' altogether; at any rate
he choked it off suddenly with a 'Farewell', in which nothing is
concluded save that the Prince goes over to the Catholic Church.
From this description it is evident that Schiller's one attempt at
novel-writing is of no great account as a contribution to artistic
fiction. It is a torso consisting of two heterogeneous parts. It is not
a study of life based upon the observation of life, but a tale of
marvelous happenings which are recounted for the purpose of showing
their subtle reaction upon the plastic mind of the Prince. The hero is
taken over a route that was to become very familiar,--the route from a
narrow and gloomy type of Protestantism through liberalism, rationalism,
skepticism, Pyrrhonism, and mental exhaustion to the repose of the
Catholic Church. Of course the story was not to end there, but what the
further developments were to have been one can only guess. Schiller
himself did not think it worth while to enlighten the public, even after
his 'Ghostseer' began to call out imitations and continuations.
In the 'Letters upon Don Carlos', published in 1788, in Wieland's
_Merkur_, Schiller undertook to defend himself against his critics and
to correct some misapprehensions. In temper and style they are
admirable, even when they do not convince. They begin by admitting and
accounting for that seeming incongruity between the first three and the
last two acts, which has always been the gravamen of critical objection
to 'Don Carlos'. After this they attempt to show that such a character
as Posa might very well have existed in the sixteenth century at the
Spanish court. Then we are told that it was not the author's purpose to
depict Carlos and Posa as a pair of ideal friends. For Carlos, indeed,
friendship is everything, but not for Posa. In him the passion for
friendship is everywhere subordinated to the passion for humanity. He is
not to be blamed, therefore, for belying the character of a true friend,
since that is not his dominant and essential character. He regards
Carlos merely as an indispensable tool for his political designs. In his
interview with the king he is carried away by a momentary
enthusiasm,--what he says there is of no importance, his hopes being
really fixed upon Don Carlos. At the beginning of the fourth act he sees
not his personal friend, but the instrument of his political plans, in
awful danger. He resolves to save him for Flanders and for humanity by
sacrificing himself. This is no more unnatural or inconceivable than the
self-sacrifice of Regulus. But Posa wishes to save his friend like a god
and not like a common level-headed Philistine. He has the soul of a
Plutarchian hero, and where two ways present themselves, the most
natural is for him the most heroic. Hence his desperate procedure and
its disastrous consequences.
To all of which one can give but a qualified assent, the difficulty
being that the play is not so constructed as to bring out its author's
intention. The character of Posa in Act IV is a surprise, and a
disagreeable surprise. His conduct may harmonize with a theory of
antique heroism, but it does not grow naturally out of what precedes.
There is no exigency that calls for his heroic foolhardiness. The reader
or the spectator can hardly be supposed to know that the famous tenth
scene in the third act, the longest and most carefully elaborated in the
whole play, does not count. One naturally supposes that it does count,
and the only way it can count is to create a hopeful situation of which
Posa is absolute master. When, therefore, he throws away his advantage
and deliberately plunges his friend into a needless danger, in order to
make an opportunity for rescuing him at the cost of his own life, one
inevitably associates him mentally not with antique heroes but with
modern lunatics.
A man capable of conceiving such a hero as Posa, and defending the
conception as true to life, could hardly be expected to adjust his mind
easily to such a work as Goethe's 'Egmont'. In his review of the play,
published in 1788, Schiller found, indeed, much to praise; but his
general praise was so mixed up with general fault-finding as to produce
upon the Rudolstadt people the impression of a naughty _lèse-majesté_.
He divined correctly enough that 'Egmont' was to be regarded as a drama
of character, rather than of plot or of passion. But Egmont's character
seemed to him painfully lacking in 'greatness'. Egmont, so the criticism
runs, really does nothing extraordinary. He is idolized by the people,
but the deeds upon which his fame rests have all been done before the
curtain rises. In the play he appears as a light-hearted cavalier who
affronts us by persistently refusing to take serious things seriously.
In particular the review objected to Goethe's perversion of history in
representing Egmont not as a married man with a large family of children
but as a bachelor with a bourgeois sweetheart. Not that Schiller
regarded the departure from history as reprehensible in itself. The
dramatist has a right to pervert facts for the purpose of exciting
sympathy for his hero; but in this case, Schiller argued, the effect is
to degrade the character of Egmont and thus to alienate sympathy.
Finally the review took exception to Egmont's vision of Freedom In the
form of Clärchen; this, Schiller thought, was a deplorable plunge into
opera at the end of a serious drama.
To adjudicate the issue thus sharply drawn between the two great German
poets would require some preliminary attention to their fundamental
difference of artistic method,--a subject that will concern us in a
subsequent chapter. Here suffice it to remark that Schiller was not
entirely in the wrong. While Goethe was incomparably the more subtle
psychologist, Schiller had the better eye, or rather he cared more, for
that which is dramatically effective, average human nature being such,
as it is. His dramatic instinct told him that Egmont was not a very
powerful stage-play. Its subtle psychology did not impress him so much
as its lack of 'greatness'. And then he had his pique against Goethe and
wished to show the Weimarians that _he_ at least could perceive the
spots on the sun. Goethe's serene comment upon reading the critique was
to the effect that the reviewer had analyzed the moral part of the play
very well indeed, but in dealing with the poetic aspect of it he had
left something to be done by others.[78]
The dramatic fragment, 'The Misanthrope Reconciled', which Schiller
fished up out of his drawer in 1790 and used, _faute de mieux_, to fill
space in the eleventh number of the _Thalia_, was begun, as we have
seen, in Dresden. Possibly the theme may have been suggested at Mannheim
by the problem of staging Shakspere's 'Timon'. At any rate the theme was
congenial for a man who had 'embraced the world in glowing passion and
found in his arms a lump of ice'. At Weimar he returned to it several
times, puzzled over the general plan, added a little here and there, but
finally gave it up as a bad subject for dramatic treatment. The
published fragment is certainly of no great account. It introduces a
misanthrope, Hutten by name, who, as feudal lord, treats his dependents
handsomely out of sheer contempt for them. When they come to thank him
on his birthday, he spurns their gratitude and scolds them, having made
up his mind never to be duped again by any show of human emotion. He has
brought up his beautiful and dutiful daughter to be an angel of mercy
and a paragon of perfection, but he insists that she too shall be a
misanthrope like himself. He makes her swear that she will never marry,
but she shrewdly tacks on the proviso, 'except with papa's consent'. The
exposition shows her duly in love with a cheerful and estimable youth
named Rosenberg; and the problem is: How will Rosenberg manage the
misanthrope? That he was to win somehow is evident from the title.
In his translations from Euripides, which also belong to the period
under consideration, Schiller aimed partly at the improvement of his own
taste. He hoped to familiarize himself with the spirit of the Greeks and
to acquire something of their manner. He thought that they might teach
him simplicity both in expression and in the construction of dramatic
plots; and he felt that his style was in need of their chastening
influence. Of 'The Phoenician Women' he translated about one-third, but
omitted the choruses entirely; of the 'Iphigenia in Aulis' he translated
nearly the whole text, rendering the choruses very freely in rimed lines
of uneven length and varying cadence. His work reads smoothly and gives
the general effect of Euripides, but cannot count as good translation.
It was not only that his Greek scholarship was deficient, but he lacked
patience,--an indispensable virtue for the translator. His real original
was not the Greek text at all, but the Latin version of Joshua Barnes;
and when this appeared to him jejune and unpoetic he sometimes created
an original of his own.
The other minor writings of the years 1788 and 1789 may be passed over
as of little significance. On the poetic side there were three or four
occasional poems, and also the rimed epistle called 'The Celebrated
Wife', in which the unfortunate husband of a literary lady pours out the
tale of his domestic woes. In prose there were several perfunctory
reviews contributed to the _Litteratur-Zeitung_, and also an
anecdote--exhumed from an old chronicle and retold for the
_Merkur_--relating to a breakfast given to the Duke of Alva by the
Countess of Schwarzburg in the year 1547. To these may be added,
finally, the short story entitled 'Play of Fate,' also published in the
_Merkur_, which describes, under a thin disguise of fictitious names,
the rise and fall and rehabilitation of Karl Eugen's former minister,
P.H. Rieger.[79]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 73: Letter of July 28, 1787, to Körner.]
[Footnote 74: Letter of Nov. 19, 1787.]
[Footnote 75: In the original, lines 145-8, of the earlier version:
Schöne Welt, wo bist du?--Kehre wieder,
Holdes Blültenalter der Natur!
Ach! nur in dem Feenland der Lieder
Lebt noch deine goldne Spur.]
[Footnote 76: In the original:
Im Fleisz kann dich die Biene meistern,
In der Geschicklichkeit ein Wurm dein Lehrer sein,
Dein Wissen teilest du mit vorgezogenen Geistern,
Die Kunst, O Mensch, hast du allein.]
[Footnote 77: Letter of March 17, to Körner.]
[Footnote 78: Letter of Oct. 1, 1788, Goethe to Karl August.]
[Footnote 79: See above, page 135.]